White Beech: The Rainforest Years (35 page)

Early scientific nomenclature was hardly more reliable and much more unwieldy. Caspar Bauhin, professor of anatomy and botany at Basel, had arrived at a version of a binomial system in
Pinax Theatri Botanici
(1596), but it was diagnostic simply; Bauhin had no thought of an underlying system. His book would be one of the many sources used by Linnaeus. As was
Eléments de Botanique ou Méthode pour reconnaître les Plantes
by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, first published in 1694, with a Latin version in 1700, and a further revised Latin version in 1719. Many of the genera now credited to Linnaeus were actually named earlier by Bauhin and Tournefort. Linnaeus outlined his system of scientific nomenclature in his
Systema Naturae
in 1735, and developed it further in
Genera Plantarum
in 1737, but not all European naturalists were persuaded of its rightness.

It was Tournefort who began the practice of naming new genera and new species after his colleagues, as an expression of his gratitude for their supplying him with specimens and detailed descriptions. All subsequent botanists including Linnaeus have followed suit. As a consequence the Cave Creek rainforest is haunted by the ghosts of a vanished tribe of European naturalists. The White Beech that gives this book its name belongs to a genus Linnaeus called
Gmelina
, in honour of Johann Georg Gmelin, professor of chemistry and natural history at the University of St Petersburg, principal author of
Flora Sibirica
(1747–69). The type of the genus
Gmelina
was a night-flowering Asian shrub, given the species name
asiatica
. It was better known to the Ayurvedic practitioners, who used a decoction of the root bark as an anti-inflammatory, as ‘biddari’ or ‘badhara’. It is as ‘Badhara Bush’ that
Gmelina asiatica
has become known as a weed in Central Queensland; otherwise it and its near relatives are commonly known as ‘Bushbeech’, for no reason that I can intuit.

Linnaeus and his academic colleagues came by their botanical training in university faculties of medicine. Plant recognition was an essential prerequisite for a career that was then understood to consist principally in the administration of remedies derived from plants. Linnaeus held the chair of medicine and botany originally established at the University of Uppsala in 1693. In France the post of Botaniste du Roi grew out of the directorship of the Jardin Royal des Plantes Médicinales. At the University of Glasgow botany was combined with anatomy from 1718 to 1818, when a separate chair of botany was founded. When the first chairs of pharmacology were established in Europe, the study of botany formed part of the course of study. Pharmacognosy required a close and accurate observation and classification of the plant species that provided most of the materials of the pharmacopoeia, so we are not surprised to find that many of the first professional botanists originally qualified in pharmacology.

The first person to collect any Australian plant species was an amateur, the freebooter William Dampier. In 1688 when his ship
Cygnet
was beached on the north-west coast of Australia near King Sound, Dampier passed the time while it was being repaired making notes on the native flora and fauna. On a second voyage, in the
Roebuck
, he came ashore at Shark Bay and travelled north-east as far as La Grange Bay, all the while collecting specimens and making records, which were illustrated with sketches by his clerk James Brand. Back in England in 1701, though in serious trouble for the loss of the
Roebuck
, Dampier remembered to send his materials to Thomas Woodward of the Royal Society. Woodward sent them on to John Ray, pioneer naturalist and author of the
Historia Generalis Plantarum
(1686–1704), and his collaborator Leonard Plukenet, Royal Professor of Botany. The meticulously pressed specimens of the plants Dampier collected on the north-west coast of Australia in August–September 1699 may still be seen today in the Sherardian Herbarium in Oxford, with William Sherard’s speculative Latin labels attached.

It was only when Robert Brown was working his way through Dampier’s specimens in 1810 that they were given systematic names. When Brown recognised one specimen as being from a new, unnamed genus he had no hesitation in naming it after its original collector,
Dampiera
. Dampier’s specimen, being the first to be collected, is therefore to be considered the type for the whole genus, which turned out to consist of more than fifty species distributed all over Australia. The Dampiera Dampier collected was one of the more spectacular, with violet-blue flowers borne on silver-white foliage, in Latin
incana
, ‘hoary’. The genus is at present undergoing revision, but it will never acquire a more readily accepted common or scientific name. There could be no vaster, more durable or more engaging memorial available to anyone than to have a whole tribe of beautiful living things named after him.

The most important figure in Australian botany is another highly endowed amateur, Joseph Banks. Banks became interested in botany when he was a small boy. As a student in 1764, when he found that there was no teaching of botany at Oxford, he paid for a series of lectures to be delivered by Cambridge botanist Israel Lyons. He then continued his studies in botany at the Chelsea Physic Garden and the British Museum, where he met Daniel Solander who put him in touch with his own teacher, Linnaeus. In 1766 Banks travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador, and published an account of the plants and animals he found there. When he heard of the planning of an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus, desperate to be appointed naturalist on the voyage, he stepped in with a donation of £10,000 towards the cost of the expedition. When the
Endeavour
set out from England in 1768 Banks was aboard, along with a retinue of illustrators and scientists, including Solander. Banks’s purpose was to collect specimens of the flora of the remotest parts of the earth, for his own collection and for the royal collection at Kew. He succeeded admirably, bringing back specimens of about 110 new genera and 1,300 new species.

Some of the Cave Creek flora were first collected by Banks’s cohort in 1770, some at Botany Bay and some on the Endeavour River, but the specimens were not studied in time to provide the types. The Black Bean, for example, was originally collected on the Endeavour River in 1770, but not identified until 1830, when Hooker described the specimens collected later by Cunningham and Frazer, by which time the name had already been used by Robert Mudie in two books,
The Picture of Australia
and
Vegetable Substances
, both of 1828 (Mabberley, 1992).

Every naturalist botanising in the New World had to send all his specimens back to the big European collections for identification; of these by far the most important was, and is, Kew. The introduction to the ‘Australian Virtual Herbarium’ on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew website gives a pretty fair assessment:

Australia has a vascular flora of about 20,000 species. Of these, 8,125 had been described by the completion of Bentham’s
Flora Australiensis
(1863–1878), written at Kew, and of this group, comprising more than a third of the current total taxa, most have Type material of some kind at Kew. These include collections by R. Brown, J. Banks & D. Solander, J. D. Hooker, A. & R. Cunningham, R. C. Gunn, J. Milligan, C. Stuart, G. Caley, F. Mueller, J. Drummond, J. McGillivray, T. Mitchell, A. F. Oldfield, G. Maxwell, L. Leichhardt, B. Bynoe, C. Fraser, H. Beckler, H. H. Behr, W. Baxter, J. Dallachy and many more. Taxa described later are also represented to a lesser extent in Kew. For many taxa there are multiple Type specimens in Kew (holotypes, isotypes, syntypes and lectotypes), and many associated historical collections (e.g. non-type specimens cited by Bentham, 1863–1878), vital for interpretation of early botanical works.

Thus the old world, in the name of scientific method, extended and intensified its control over the new. After his first foray Banks concentrated on building up a network of scientific contacts all over Europe, and employed troops of botanists whom he sent hither and yon to every part of the known world, to continue amassing specimens for his own herbarium and the royal collections at Kew, and any other establishments that might have materials to offer in exchange. In 1778 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a position he would hold till his death; he would eventually take over the botanic garden at Kew, set up the herbarium there, and organise, finance and direct the scientific exploration of Australia from the other side of the world. Banks is commemorated at Cave Creek by the specific name of our violet,
Viola banksii
, and Solander by our crowsfoot,
Geranium solanderi
. In 1782 in the
Supplementum Plantarum
(15:26) the younger Linnaeus named an important genus (seventy-seven species at the present count)
Banksia
for Banks, who had been created baronet in 1781. Australia was by then so much Banks’s domain that when a name for the continent was being sought Linnaeus suggested ‘Banksia’ for that too. Happily the suggestion was not heeded.

After the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 the amateurs John White, surgeon-general (
ADB
), and Richard Johnson, colonial chaplain (
ADB
), took up the work of sending Australian plant material to Banks. In 1791 Banks arranged to pay the Superintendent of Convicts David Burton an annual stipend for collecting seeds and plant material. Unfortunately Burton accidentally shot himself the next year (
ADB
). In 1798 Banks sent out George Caley (
ADB
). As Caley had no formal qualifications Banks himself paid his salary of fifteen shillings a week; Caley collected for both Banks and Kew, and was allowed to sell extra specimens to nurserymen.

Banks was also responsible for the presence in Australia of one of my heroes, Robert Brown (
ADB
). Brown had come to botany through the school of medicine at Edinburgh University where he enrolled in 1791 only to drop out in 1793, possibly for lack of money, and maybe for lack of attention to his studies as well. He had perhaps spent too much time botanising in the Highlands, sometimes with the nurseryman George Don. In 1794 he joined the army, serving in Ireland as a surgeon’s mate, which took up so little time that he was able to concentrate on his botanical researches. At this stage he was fascinated by cryptogams and pioneered the use of the microscope in examining minute plant parts. The genera of many of our rainforest mosses and ferns were first identified by Brown, who contributed (unacknowledged) to James Dickson’s
Fasciculi plantarum cryptogamicarum britanniae
in 1796. In 1800 Banks offered to appoint the twenty-seven-year-old Brown naturalist to Matthew Flinders’s circumnavigation of Australia, and provided him with the services of the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. Brown prepared for the trip by studying the collections already made by Banks and Solander. HMS
Investigator
sailed in July 1801; when it called at Port Jackson for the second time in June 1803, signalling the completion of the circumnavigation of the continent, Brown and Bauer decided to stay and continue collecting in New South Wales. In three and a half years in Australia Brown collected 3,400 species, more than half of them previously unknown. Though many of his specimens were lost aboard a ship that was wrecked on the return journey, he was able in 1810 to publish a preparatory Australian flora,
Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen
. When Leichhardt set off on his first botanising rambles he carried a copy in his saddlebag. Allan Cunningham too carried a copy.

Brown’s was not the first attempt at a provisional Australian flora. The naturalist on the expedition of d’Entrecastaux to Oceania (1791–3), Jacques de Labillardière, who collected specimens in south-west Australia and Tasmania, had brought out his
Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen
in instalments between 1804 and 1807. Sir Joseph Banks, whom he had met on a visit to England in 1783, intervened when the British confiscated Labillardière’s scientific collections as spoils of war and arranged for their restitution, unmindful that the royal collection would be poorer for lack of them. Labillardière got his reward in 1793 when Sir James Edward Smith named a genus of Australian plants
Billardiera
(Smith, 1:1).

Labillardière has been criticised for making unacknowledged use of specimens from the collection of the amateur naturalist Charles Louis l’Héritier de Brutelle, who is principally famous, at least among Australians, for naming the genus
Eucalyptus
. L’Héritier published the name in his
Sertum Anglicum
, an account of his botanising among the British collections in the 1780s. The species on which he founded the genus
Eucalyptus
was
Eucalyptus obliqua
, originally collected by William Anderson, physician on board HMS
Resolution
, on Cook’s second expedition when it visited Tasmania in 1774. Anderson had called his sample ‘Aromadendron’, the smelly tree. L’Héritier renamed it after the pretty (
eu
) cap (
calyptera
) made of fused petals that encloses the anthers of the gum-blossom in bud. Anderson was assisted by David Nelson, a gardener from Kew, who was employed, paid, equipped and trained by Banks. Other species of eucalypt had been collected earlier by Banks and Solander, but when L’Héritier was working at the British Museum in 1786–7 they had not yet been named. And so it was that a man who never glimpsed the great south land, never saw a eucalypt in the wild, succeeded in naming the genus of the ‘most important and dominant trees of the Australian flora’. He also named the Kangaroo Paw
Anigozanthos
and a species of tree fern
Dicksonia
after James Dickson.